[inopinatus]

Table titles should be either centered above, or captioned below. Left-aligning them above any column instantly conveys a generally false/unintended impression of the title being a top level in the information hierarchy of the table. In the modernist makeover above I was immediately uneasy that the title stipulated “names, addresses, characteristics” whilst apparently aligned to exclude the names.

In contrast the census manual chooses to center almost all labels within their box, and when not it is almost always due to indentation, and moreover is unafraid to set column widths to fit the data not the labels, with indent and hyphenation to match. The result is both horizontally compact and intuitively comprehensible.

edit: on further reflection I also think it’s a crappy title. Titles and captions should convey context, scope, purpose - and may otherwise be omitted entirely for the editorial sin of failing to justify their own existence. As given, this one could be retitled “Table 1” with no loss of information or generality. For an article that’s trying to discuss and reformulate tabular presentation from first principles, that’s a tad disappointing. Since table titles form a crucial layer of their information catalogue, it is hardly surprising that the census manual devotes an entire chapter to the matter of title construction, and even though somewhat domain specific and archaically worded it is well worth the visit